The June I Took My Sister Instead

Kevin told me in March, at my kitchen table, between bites of a pork chop I had fried for him.

He said it the way he reads a parts invoice over the phone, flat and quick, like the hard part was already behind him.

“Tina’s coming to Gatlinburg this year,” he said. “The kids begged. I got her the cabin next to ours.”

I had the salt shaker in my hand.

I set it down very carefully, the way you set down a thing you are afraid you might throw, and I am not a woman who throws things. “Next to ours,” I said.

“Right next door. Same porch line. Mom about had a fit when the rental place said it was open.” He cut another piece of meat.

“Emma and Jake can run back and forth. They’ve never had us both on a vacation, not since they were little.”

“How much?” I asked. He chewed and swallowed and did not look at me, which is how I knew he had already done the math on how it was going to sound.

“Thirty-eight hundred, with the cleaning fee and the tax. It’s already on my card, Dawn, so there’s no sense in us talking it to death.”

I am forty-five years old. I drive a school bus for the district out of Centerville, Iowa, seventy-one miles a day on gravel and blacktop, with kids who throw up on the hills and kids who tell me their whole lives before the first stop sign.

I know how to keep my voice level. It is most of the job.

“That’s a lot of money,” I said, level as a bubble. He said it was for the kids. I said I knew who it was for.

He finally looked up then, and his face was not mean. That was the worst of it. Kevin Mraz has never had a mean face.

He had the face of a man who honestly did not see what was sitting on the table between us.

What was sitting there was six years. Six years of me laying travel brochures on that same table, and Kevin picking them up, turning them over, and saying the same four words.

I could have said them for him by the second year. I could have stitched them on a pillow.

“That’s kind of pricey.” Branson was kind of pricey. A long weekend in Galena with a room over a candy store was kind of pricey.

The Black Hills, the one I wanted most, with the bison walking right up to the car, was pricey and too far besides.

And Hot Springs, Arkansas, two nights. I had found a room in an old hotel with a stone balcony and rocking chairs, and I had circled the bathhouses in pen.

Kevin held that brochure a long time before he said it. “That’s kind of pricey, babe. We’ve got Gatlinburg.”

We always had Gatlinburg. Kevin’s family has gone to the same ridge above town the second week of June for twenty-two years.

His mother, Joan, books the cabins in January. Everybody pays for their own, and everybody eats at the big cabin with the long table.

I loved that week. I will say that plainly, because it is true and because it matters to what I did.

I loved his mother and his sisters and the cousins and the fireflies on the ridge. I bought the groceries every year and never once minded it.

But it was his family’s week. It was never ours.